Performing Transcendence: Improvisation, Instrumentality, and the Cultural Politics of Flow in Black Sacred Music

Throughout the African diaspora, music is a source of cultural and spiritual affirmation. Black musical genres such as jazz and gospel, along with their symbolic and physical ”instruments,” are tied to longstanding discourses of cultural belonging, racial authenticity, and spiritual value. In this talk, Dr. Melvin L. Butler posits music as a creative yet controversial resource for performers and practitioners who strive either to maintain the sanctity or celebrate the fluidity of their traditions. For jazz artists, improvisation is often a technology of transcendence—a vital strategy for crossing experiential boundaries and accessing an “extraordinary” realm of spiritual inspiration. In the context of Black Pentecostal Christianity, music nurtures feelings of collective distinctiveness that are reinforced through ecstatic worship, ritualized nostalgia, and conceptual oppositions between the Church and the wider “world.” These dichotomies are destabilized via the appropriation of musical styles that travel across conventional lines of sacred and secular demarcation. This talk thus highlights the cultural politics of musical flow at the crossroads of local and global practice.

Melvin L. Butler is an associate professor in the Department of Musicology of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Berklee College of Music, and an MA and PhD in music from New York University. A scholar-performer with broad interests in music and religion of the African diaspora, he has conducted field research on music and religion in the United States, Haiti, Jamaica. Through his research, writing, and teaching, he interrogates the cultural politics of popular culture and religious worship while attending to the role of musical style in constructing individual and collective identities. He is the author of Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019), which examines the theological and experiential connections between Jamaican and African American Pentecostal music and gospel performance. His next book, Claiming Haiti: Music and the Cultural Politics of Transcendence, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
An internationally acclaimed jazz saxophonist, Butler has performed with Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band for over two decades. He is featured with this ensemble on several albums, including Brian Blade Fellowship (Blue Note 1998), Perceptual (Blue Note 2000), Season of Changes (Verve 2008), the Grammy-nominated Landmarks (Verve 2014), and Body and Shadow (2017). He has worked with several other jazz artists as well, including Betty Carter, John Daversa, Joey DeFrancesco, Christian McBride, Jimmy McGriff, and Dr. Lonnie Smith. Butler is a featured soloist on the Grammy-winning recording by the John Daversa Big Band, American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom (2018). He has also toured and recorded with celebrated Haitian band Tabou Combo, with whom he recorded three albums—Why Not? (1997), 360 Degrees (1997), and Sans Limites (2000).